1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to computer systems and, more particularly, to management of computer systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
Today's computer systems, namely enterprise computer systems, make use of a wide range of products. The products are often applications, such as operating systems, application servers, database servers, JAVA Virtual Machines, etc. These computer systems often suffer from network and system-related problems. Unfortunately, given the complex mixture of products concurrently used by such computer systems, there is great difficultly in identifying and isolating of application-related problems. Typically, when a problem occurs on a computer system, it must first be isolated to a particular computer system out of many different computer systems or to the network interconnect among these systems and also to a particular application out of many different applications used by the computer system. However, conventionally speaking, isolating the problem is difficult, time consuming and requires a team of application experts with different domain expertise. These experts are expensive, and the resulting down time of computer systems is very expensive to enterprises.
Although management solutions have been developed, such solutions are dedicated to particular customers and/or specific products. Monitoring systems are able to provide monitoring for events, but offer no meaningful management of non-catastrophic problems and prevention of catastrophic problems. Hence, conventional managing and monitoring solutions are dedicated approaches that are not generally usable across different computer systems using combinations of products.
Thus, there is a need for improved management systems that are able to efficiently manage computer systems over a wide range of products.